Annihilation
by v1dya
Summary: Superpowers arise throughout the world at the behest of an entity with little concern for even the short-term the survival of the human race. Apollyonverse fic.
1. Prelude

**Prelude: Reckless Abaddon**

 **Worm belongs to Wildbow, as does the twist which inspired this story. This fic is set in the, or perhaps an, 'Apollyonverse,' a version of the Worm universe in which the two Entities which visited Earth were instead devoured by the third, known to the fandom at large as Abaddon (aka Apollyon). The short written by Wildbow about this universe can be found on the 39th Worm fanfic rec and discussion thread on SB.**

* * *

On impact, it shatters the planet in several universes. More are destroyed as it folds into itself, forming into a protective cocoon so that it might digest its prey. None of the local wildlife is able to observe it; the worlds on which it is present have been rendered utterly barren by its presence.

The entity lives for combat. Its shards grant it the potential to operate thousands of minds, to solve countless other problems, but for cycles innumerable devoted the great majority of them for one savage purpose, prioritizing this aspect of its existence above all others.

It is of gargantuan size, and has the immortality of a bacterium; it feasts without pause, constantly absorbing whatever it can, the materials flowing to replace damaged subsections. The two lesser entities it has just consumed are rent asunder, and much of the useful mass goes towards repairing the minor but non-negligible damage inflicted by the one that fought.

The entity takes a moment, brief even by the standards of the local bipeds, to reflect upon its victims. The stronger prey, which thought itself a warrior, had some shards which were of obvious use. But the entity's feelings towards the one that surrendered are less than contempt. Weakness. Cowardice. It expends effort towards inspecting the latter's shards with something like reluctance.

But as it studies the contents of its digestive system, it sees utility in a vision of the lesser one, a plot which it had devised, and seen reforged as it was consumed.

The entity's shards stir. Some originate from older members of the smaller subspecies on which it has just dined. Acting in concert, they provide more computational power than could ever be achieved by an ordinary pair of the diminutive variants.

The course devised is similar in its essentials to the original scheme of the Thinker, but modified to suit this entity's preferences and needs. It cannot afford to linger excessively on this planet; once it emerges partially, as it must in order to seed the remaining bipeds with shards, it will find itself in a disfavorable metabolic position if it moves as slowly as the plan's creator envisioned. And thus, the essentials of the entity's modifications fell into place.

The shards would grant their hosts powers, still. It would be suboptimal to take the time to temper them carefully, so the entity reforges them en masse, splitting apart all but the weakest.

None of the resultant shards have anywhere near enough power to challenge even the lesser entities. Some of them, however, will threaten their own hosts considerably upon attachment, a possibility the Thinker responded with further shard-tinkering.

This, too, costs more than it will yield, and so the entity does not do it.

The lesser entities planned to install their shards in targets over some length of time, building up the conflict needed for the prepared shards to grow. Their shards would have waited for for their hosts to attune before manifesting.

The predator is impatient, so the moment it emerges, it implants all the shards it has ready, and activates them by force.

* * *

Kenta strode down the city streets. Order had been restored in Japan faster than in nearly every other major country, but here, chaos still reigned.

He might have had something to do with that.

Kenta, who was half-Chinese, had grown accustomed to poor treatment from both nationalities. Most people in Japan, when they found out, seemed to consider him less than human.

Having grown scales, wings, a snout, and about four more feet in height, amongst other things, Kenta suspected there was little danger that he would ever be perceived as a human again. In this, he wasn't alone.

Math was never his strong suit, but if he had to guess, about one in ten had been Changed in some way. Only a few had obvious alterations like he did, but he suspected the true number of Seamless, who showed no physical deviances to go along with their newfound abilities, was much smaller than was apparent, perhaps even composing only a minority of the Changed. Certainly, most of the opposing Yakuza he'd torn apart showed such signs. Black, hardened masses growing inside, tumors, perhaps. Bizarrely shaped bones, organs that seemed half melted. He'd seen such even in those he hadn't burnt to death, suggesting that though they seemed normal enough, they had indeed paid a price for their powers.

Kenta did not consider his new body to be a burden, however. There was no sentimentality for the days in which he had been a soft sack of flesh, only slightly more difficult to kill than a cockroach, at least for his present form.

He heard a faint, guttural noise. He followed the trail to a sight familiar in general, if not in its particulars.

The sound came from a mouth, and this was the most recognizable feature of the aberration before him. It was the sole orifice of what was otherwise almost a sheet of flesh. It had a certain thickness, giving the impression of dough kneaded in a heart-like shape. Here the resemblance between the Ill-Changed and anything appetizing ended, for remnants of what Kenta presumed were its internal organs were studded into its skin, linked by vivid branched blood vessels.

The creature flopped ineffectually. Kenta moved forward to deliver a merciful death.

He sensed the ambush the moment he stepped into the alley; no less than twelve individuals, nine men and three women. Their attire labeled them, improbably enough, as members of the JSDF.

One stepped forward, without any sign of fear, and greeted a moment, he replied in kind.

"Your country requires your assistance," the leader, who, preposterously, called herself Kurokaze.

Kenta could think of a variety of comebacks to this, but held his tongue. "The country is doing all right, as far as I can see," he replied, his voice a deep, resounding rumble.

Some of the others could not disguise their surprise that he could speak at all. Kenta marked them for death first.

"There have been some recent developments," said Kurokaze smoothly. "The foes you would find would be of considerably higher quality, should you join the Sentai."

Kenta knew he was being manipulated, knew that they had somehow found out what would most likely motivate him to join any group, let alone a government-sanctioned one. "If it is not a worthy opponent, you will regret this," he growled.

The leader seemed unperturbed. "I am certain I will not."

Kenta paused. "This must be an exceptional enemy, to have consumed so much of your time that you could not even put this one out of his misery."

"That is Gaitou," replied Kurokaze, "and it isn't so simple. You are, however, welcome to try and end her suffering."

Needing no further encouragement, Kenta drew himself up and unleashed a torrent of flame upon the aberration. The fire burned as hot as ever, but when the flames cleared, the Ill-Changed, as well as a roughly circular patch of the alleyway, was not even singed.

* * *

The locker was cramped, but it was the best place Emma could find to hide.

When It first happened, when the world went insane, many had thought to flee Winslow High. If they'd only stopped to think that maybe, just maybe, It hadn't stopped at the school's edge…

But most hadn't, not until the screams and explosions from outside had become intense enough that they could be heard even from her locker.

Back when the internet was still up, she'd found out that it was happening world wide. Just about every major urban center in the U.S. was a warzone, which still put the country ahead of the majority of the world.

Someone had begun to fiddle with the lock. Emma braced herself and prepared. She hadn't dropped dead or sprouted vile growths, but she had changed, somehow. She had felt it, at the very moment Sophia had disappeared, Greg turned into a slug, and Mr. Gladly went berserk and started strangling strangling students with his bare hands.

When she'd first tried to hide, she'd neutralized the janitor's closet as a viable hiding spot by inadvertently ripping the door off. When she ran into Julia, they were both confronted by a junior who'd left a trail of bodies in his wake. He'd made a single hand gesture, and she'd felt a sharp pain. The surprise was enough for her to fall, which was fortuitous, as the murderer moved on. She'd gotten a glimpse of Julia's body; her hands were clutching her throat as she died.

Emma wasn't a fighter. This was also fortunate, since she was surprised enough but the ease with which the door was unlocked that she didn't immediately deck the person who'd opened it.

Her brief surprise at the fact that it was Sparky was overshadowed by the sight of her friend.

"Taylor!" she exclaimed.

"Wait," muttered the dark haired girl. But she wasn't loud enough, and Emma jumped into the hallway, and ran until she was less than a foot away. Then she was still.

Emma stared at her friend while she processed the fact that she couldn't move. Worse, there was a - something - not exactly a voice, but a will, flowing through every part of her. It urged her back, and slowly, jerkily, she stepped back. Or rather, her body stepped back. She was not in control until she'd managed a few steps. Then, at once, the feeling came back to her limbs, and she collapsed.

* * *

A/N: Of course, the PoD should alter things with the result that no one born after the original impact should even exist, but for the sake of having recognizable characters, the fic is set on an earth where, by sheer coincidence, most of the characters we know from earth Bet are around. Indeed, the only ones that aren't are those brought into the universe from elsewhere (the travelers, the case 53s) and those who would not be around were it not for their powers (not too many of these, but, for instance, we can assume Alexandria died of cancer). Naturally, the lack of powers until the moment the entity injected them means that the world's opinion and knowledge of powers was nonexistent prior to the Change.

I have a broad idea of what I want to do with this story. It'll probably be in the first person, from Taylor's perspective, with third-person interludes, and I'm hoping to get practice at a less abstract kind of story, ie one not from the perspective of some kind of alien. I couldn't resist putting an entity section in there, but hopefully other than that this should be more comprehensible than most of my fics thus far.


	2. Massacre 1-1

Massacre 1.1

Have you ever had one of those dreams where everything goes wrong? When all kinds of horrible, irrecoverable disasters just pile on, one after the other? That's what the first day of the Change seemed like. Minus, of course, the waking up part.

I'd walked through the metal detectors that morning as an ordinary high school senior. I may or may not have been nodding off in English class when the Change struck. Of course, people didn't settle on a name immediately, and in Winslow High, as in many other places, the most popular term was simply 'It.'

You must understand how that fit so well, how 'It' worked so unambiguously, unless you come from one of those unbelievably lucky, usually tiny towns where, by chance, there were no Changed, or they all happened to be Seamless. For them, well, the ones in America anyway, the day of the Change was, as I later learned, not of major import in and of itself, just a day when the internet, and possibly some other utilities, shut down for a couple of hours.

For people in any kind of crowded environment… it was much more memorable.

Much later, I found out that number of people who'd actually Changed couldn't have been more than one in eight. It didn't _feel_ that way, though.

Granted, I didn't see the moment of the Change myself. But when I came to, there were seven corpses in the classroom, with the sound of fighting and terror coming in from all sides. Sparky, who, with characteristic placidity but unusual sensibility was using phone to discover as much as he could about the situation, told me that I'd only killed three of them, though two more were soon added to my body count.

It should have shaken me to my core, but - well, it wasn't so much that I felt nothing, but that the sharp pain in my head was keeping me from focusing on much else.

The school's power had been long gone by that point, but via wifi we'd managed to get some idea of what the situation was. A lot of people, myself among them, had thought, idiotically in retrospect, that somehow the Change would be restricted to the particular town, street or even the building in which we happened to be at the time. But no, It was worldwide. Some countries were functioning so well that their coverage of events dominated the web. Foreign bureaus in Japan, for instance, made up the majority of English language old media accounts of It. Our mainstream media wasn't saying much, other than repeating what was apparently the government's official instructions: stay indoors and secure whatever entry points you could without making it obvious that anyone was home. Apparently looters were less of a problem than straight up murderers.

There was a general consensus that cities were worse off than rural places, and that getting away from them was advisable. That, of course, was of no use to us; the explosions from outside seemed to occur on a regular basis.

Shortly after we lost internet access, we decided to try and get to the basement. At the very least, I thought, we could go somewhere with fewer corpses. We bobbed and weaved through the hallways, allowing us to keep away from… well, there were a lot of things to steer clear of. We narrowly avoided at least five kids we saw that could kill with just a flick of a finger, or even a look, after we missed the third one, I began to realize that the changes Sparky had undergone were more than just a personality overhaul.

Now he dipped down to Emma's level, as she trembled on the floor. "She'll be ok," he proclaimed with authority.

The day before, I wouldn't have trusted him to tell me the time, but Sparky was one of the fortunate ones. He'd been affected by It, that was clear enough, but there wasn't a growth or blemish on him. Not only that, his acne had actually _cleared_.

On top of everything else, he'd suddenly developed a knack for, well, almost anything. The guy who had barely avoided being held back a grade could suddenly take apart complicated devices and put them back together. He'd gotten a heightened sense of awareness, too; and from the beginning I could see it had something to do with the people who'd Changed. He could sense them from some ways away, and even detect if they were hostile or friendly, and even get a vague idea of what kind of abilities they'd gained.

Lucky bastard.

He hadn't needed his new ability to see what was going on with me. All I can remember about that moment was a vision - things get hazy just trying to think about it, which, admittedly happened a lot regardless of what I was doing. When I'd snapped out of it, there were three twitching bodies at my feet, and two more standing uncomfortably close, rigidly at attention.

Oh, and there was something jutting out of my head. It felt too hard to be flesh - could whatever It was have actually reshaped my skull? Whatever it was, it gave me a searing headache as well.

Sparky was right, unsurprisingly enough. Emma stirred, shaking.

"What was-" she began.

"We've gotta go," Sparky interrupted. "There's one coming, though he's still some ways away."

"OK," I said immediately. I grimaced, and tried to focus. "Let's try that way."

We rushed through the hallway, not at all light on our feet. There was still screaming and violent noise from both above and below, but this floor was comparatively quiet. We heard muffled sounds from every classroom we passed. Were the people inside trying to survive like us, or out of their minds? I didn't care to find out.

Sparky suddenly turned into a room. I waited for the two of them to get some distance before following. It was long enough to notice that we were going into the girls bathroom.

From the moment we entered, we knew we weren't alone. A bizarre, rasping sound emanated from one of the stalls.

"What the fuck are we doing here?" hissed Emma, her tone asking an additional, implicit question, specifically: Why on earth was Sparky leading the way?

"That's why nobody else's here," he said. "The noise scared them off."

We eyed the stall apprehensively. Emma was the first to move towards it, I gave it some distance.

I'd like to say I didn't throw up when I saw it. You'd think after seeing people that might as well be walking blobs of cancer, there wouldn't be anything left that could shock me. But the Change had plenty new horrors to throw at me.

It would have been one thing if it had just been a mound of flesh in a pool of blood, but the pink mass didn't seem to be wholly solid or liquid. Parts of the thing seemed almost recognizable, but some regions seemed almost to have melted into a fluid, which reminded me of nothing so much as fruit juice. What remained of the person's face seemed to have been stretched across the lump, with the noise we heard coming from an oversize, distorted mouth.

Yeah, I'm sure you've had your fill of nightmarish Changes, but that one was unique. In spite of the relative preservation of the face, we'd never have identified her without her backpack, which had fallen in front of her, partially soaked in the sickening liquid.

"Madison?" I asked, recognizing the article as hers.

The thing on the floor gave no sign that it had heard. Its one good eye stared ahead, unseeing.

"We gotta help her," Emma said quietly.

"Can we?" I asked.

"You can," responded Sparky.

I was briefly bewildered, and was about to say so, when the implication hit me.

"What do you mean?" Emma asked. "Wait, do you have some other power?"

"No," I replied somberly.

It took her a moment.

" _What_? Why would you-"

"On average, people who get caught by Taylor last about half an hour," said Sparky. "Well, from what I could see, anyway. Madison may not look like much, but even with your strength, you wouldn't be able to put her out of her misery. But Taylor's power… it has some kind of adverse effect on anybody it acts on, and it'll work on her too."

""But we don't know if this – all of this – is unfixable, do we? Maybe something could be done-"

"No," replied Sparky firmly. "I'm pretty sure even if we make it out, there's nothing around that could help her in any other way."

"How do you _know_?" she asked, a hint of desperation in her voice. "Maybe if we could get her to-" She stopped, apparently trying to think of something that could treat partial liquefaction.

The throbbing in my head was getting worse. "I don't know how, but he's been right before," I answered. "Knew where people were, what they could do. That's how we found you."

"If it was you," he asked Emma, "Would you want to be left like that?"

She paused. The three of us were silent as what were considering was sinking in. Madison continued to make wretched noises.

Emma looked at the floor. "Do it, Taylor," she said quietly.

I wasn't certain of exactly what I would do, but I moved towards her. As she fell into my radius, the noise stopped.

"Hopefully she can't feel anything now, at least," Emma murmured. She explained what she had felt, when she'd been under my power. It was a relief, actually, to know that my victims didn't experience any physical pain on top of the horror of not being in control of their bodies.

The three - or four, maybe - of us sat, as we planned our next move. I kept myself near the stall while Emma and Sparky kept to the other side of the room. We'd managed to scavenge some food, so we were at least able to eat.

"You think anyone'll come for us?" asked Emma.

"It was crazy out there, the last time we checked," I replied. "It's probably going to be a while."

"Well, when you think about it, Brockton Bay isn't exactly the nicest city," Sparky offered. "I mean, at Winslow alone we've got like three gangs. And take all the criminals and the new nutcases..."

"Not to mention the police were drawn thin already. If It's actually totally random, then there's probably more of the psychos than there are actual cops."

"They might have to call in the National guard…"

Sparky's power had it's limits; it couldn't do anything like predict the future. But nothing we could think of made a mad dash outside seem like a decent option. And so we decided to wait it out.


	3. Massacre 1-2

**Massacre 1.2**

It was after Madison passed that he noticed it.

"There's some fighting going on," said Sparky as he paused, to focus. "Two rooms down. But they're going room by room.

"One of the killers." He turned to Emma. "You met him before."

That was enough to catch my attention. "Wait," I asked. "You ran into one of them and survived?"

"One of who?" replied Emma. I felt a stab of irritation, amplified, no doubt, by the pounding sensation in my head.

Irrational. How could she be expected to know of a random subclass of affected people we'd characterized in the past few hours? I fought down the strangely sharp hostile feeling.

"There's a bunch of kids we saw, who could kill people way too easily," I informed her. "Usually they can do it without moving more than a finger. And worse, they can fool Sparky's power."

"Uh… But then, how do you know one's coming?" Emma asked Sparky.

"Only indirectly," he said. He didn't elaborate, but I could guess: if he could get a reading off of nearby people with abilities, he could probably notice when they died.

"They're never… hidden from his power," I began. "But they always trick it, somehow. He knew something about what happened to me, and I think he did about you too." I paused.

Sparky spoke. "You're stronger, and you can't get hurt easily, right?"

Emma blinked, evidently not having quite believed in his ability. "Yeah…"

"Well, I get info like that about everyone that It happened to. But with these guys, it's _wrong_. We saw one of them drop twelve people by waving her hand, and you know what my ability gave me about her? It made me think she was a water bringer."

"A what?""

"Like… that her power was to make water, like, the liquid, appear? Or that's what I kept thinking, looking at her"

"But we didn't see any H2O," I added. Some macabre impulse caused me to add, "Unless you count the blood." For a second I wondered if that could actually be the right interpretation of the 'message' Sparky's ability gave him. The implications of these 'powers' being able to give technically accurate but misleading information were…

"Yeah," said Emma shakily. "I met one of them. But.. the one I saw didn't kill me, even though he tried. Maybe we could fight them?"

I felt a fresh pulse of agony as Sparky began to fiddle with a vent above. "Whoever it is, if they see us coming, they'll finish us a second later. Me and Sparky, anyway," Or that's what his power suggested, the first time we ran into one.

Emma deflated.

"Actually, it might not be such a bad idea," Sparky said. "We're running out of options."

"What do you-"

"Only one of them's a killer," he said. "But there's two, and the other's _helping._ Telling the killer where to go, tracking their prey, if I had to guess. That one moves into the room first, and nothing happens. Then the other shows up, and..."

We absorbed this piece of news in silence. The vent was open, but it didn't look like any of us could fit.

"So you might be able to fight them?" I asked Emma, with a bit more hopelessness in my voice than I'd intended.

"Well, it _hurt_ like crazy, but whatever that guy did didn't do to me what it did to … Julia. If I could grab him in time - well, I'm stronger now, I think I could deal with him."

I heard the hesitation in her voice, and felt another burst of annoyance. I reminded myself that she hadn't actually killed anyone yet, even indirectly like I had with the first kids unlucky enough to have sat next to me when It happened.

"There's only one left in the room next to us," Sparky announced. "But they've been alive for some time now."

Emma stared. "Maybe it's somebody else who can fight. What if we rush in there right now-"

"What if it's someone who's joining up with them?" I asked. "Or if they're just … playing?" This wasn't a great school, but even the worst bullying incidents we had didn't come close to anything like torturing someone to death.

"It's just the two of em again," reported Sparky. "They'll probably come here next."

"Right," said Emma. "You two hide in the corners. I'll wait by the door."

"It'll probably be that scout first."

Sparky backed away, into the far stall. I chose the one nearest the door. If Emma could slow this person down, maybe, I could jump in, release Emma from my snare, and then…

"Incoming," announced Sparky's voice.

We all tensed, but the door didn't open. I strained my ears, but couldn't hear any footsteps.

I finally broke the silence. "What the hell, man?"

Sparky sounded bewildered. "I swear, I can sense one. Like really close, and heading towards you."

I was baffled too; I'd never seen his power fail so badly. I stuck my head out of the stall, to work out what we'd do about this -

And at that moment I felt a sort of tugging, jerking sensation. It was familiar to me now; I'd experienced it when I approached Madison. But both Emma and Sparky were outside of my radius.

Both were staring at me. No, more like at the floor under me. "Look down," said Emma, shakily.

I saw her at my feet. She was halfway between the form a teenage girl and mist, but she was recognizable.

"Sophia," I addressed her, before feeling stupid. It wasn't like she could respond to me.

Well, she wouldn't have been able to, if I'd been careful. But, never having actually tried to keep anyone, I took a step back without thinking.

She burst out of my control, raging incoherently and roaring as she floated backwards. As she began to shift into an invisible form, Emma rushed forward, pushing her towards me. At this point, I had enough awareness to run forward, capturing Sophia again. I carefully pried Emma off of the three-fourths gaseous Sophia, and directed her out of my radius again.

She slumped to the ground again, shaking.

"Sorry," I said.

She shook her head. "What else were we gonna do?"

I felt like shit as I looked at her, though at least she was twitching less, and hadn't lost consciousness this time. I tried to turn my attention back to Sophia. Had she gone crazy, in addition to the physical changes? I was already starting to suspect madness was, along with cancerous growths, one of the more common symptoms of the Change.

She was sane enough to cooperate with that mass murderer though.

I found that with effort I could _see_ through her 'eyes,' though it didn't seem to give me any insight to her thoughts. There was a strange haze shrouding her vision.

"Ok, so you got her. Now what?"

I had an idea before," I said. "If I can catch her, maybe I can get her partner too."

"But her partner's the one who can drop you, probably from outside your range."

"Yeah, but what if I lure him close… not even in the room, but right up against this wall. My radius would cover some distance out there, right?"

Emma blinked. "So you'll use Sophia to…"

"It could work," said Sparky, with a hint of surprise.

 _What are you so shocked by? You couldn't do anything before, and you can't believe I'd have a good idea?_

I held my tongue, but they saw that it had irritated me.

"You OK?" Emma asked.

"Fine," I muttered. "Let's just get this over with."

I had nothing but trial and error to go on, but I managed to get her to open her mouth. Controlling her seemed to involve flexing a muscle, or rather, it felt like it. I watched as she faded in and out of existence. Well, out of visibility, at least. I found that she never dematerialized completely, but she could reach a state where was nearly immaterial, which she no doubt used to perform reconnaissance.

I tried to force her to speak. She only groaned.

"He's not gonna buy that," said Emma. I had to agree.

"Can you get her to just nod, or something?" asked Sparky.

That... seemed more doable.

I let myself see through her eyes again, pushed her into a full mist form, and drove her through the wall. I couldn't send her into the classroom next door without losing control, so I let her be, hoping the killer would be impatient enough to come out and check soon.

He was.

It was easier than I thought it would be. He got one look at Sophia, and, apparently not a fan of having to wait, lunged at her, jumping right into my range.

There was muffled thud as I slammed him against the wall. Focusing again, I could see through his eyes, as well as Sophia's. There were no other (alive) people in the hallway. His sight was weird too, but instead of a haze, there was a faint red line that seemed to flash in the middle of his field of vision. I forced Sophia to drift back into the room for safekeeping.

Carefully, I edged towards the door, directing him to walk as well. My control was sloppy; his steps were jerky and poorly placed. If I had tried to rush it, I would have probably sent him out of my zone of control.

Emma and Sparky tensed as the killer fiddled with the door, as I commanded.

"You're letting him in?" hissed Emma.

"Safest way to finish him," I replied. Well, probably it was less risky than having him flail around outside, with one false move letting him escape and retaliate.

I flinched instinctively, realizing I had lost control of someone. I relaxed only after I realized it was Sophia, and that she hadn't escaped my radius.

It was probably because she'd been trying to murder us and everyone else on the floor, but that death was much less impactful than the others. I remember mainly feeling disappointed that I couldn't use her to peek around corners discreetly, a good ability to have if we tried to run for it.

The door opened, but less than I'd ordered. There was a heavy thud as I felt myself losing control of the killer.

Blood began to trickle into the room from outside.


End file.
